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Planview Customer Success Center

Calculated Fields: Do the Right Thing!!!

In order to give users a better user experience, and to continue to tighten security for our customers, there will be some changes to calculated fields.

In a future release, the application will strictly adhere to the data type setting on the calculated field. Currently, if you had a field defined as one data type but were using it as another data type, we needed to do special processing with legacy reporting in order to make the field render correctly.

For example, a calculated field that uses FormatNumber should be defined as a string field, not a number field. This resulted in inconsistent behavior between fields in the UI and fields in reports.

See Functions for a list of functions and their correct data type. Some common misconfigurations are:

  • FormatDate function as Date instead of string
  • FormatNumber function as float/integer instead of string
  • Calc fields with View Type set to string instead of HTML

Examples of expected changes:

  • String field with numeric values used to be reported with numeric formatting.
    • Old: 1,234,567
    • New: 1234567
  • String field with money values used to be reported with money formatting.
    • Old: $500.00
    • New: 500.0
  • Date field with simple date format no longer includes time
    • Old: 2020-01-13T17:15:00+000
      New: 2020-01-13

With regard to security, when HTML was used in the formula, but the calculated field was defined as a string (instead of using the HTML display type), we were not able to guarantee against cross-site scripting, even with Strict XSS Protection enabled.

There will be no impact on fields that are configured correctly.